Vandals deface Lincoln Memorial with expletive — here's what they wrote

The National Park Service in Washington, D.C., discovered early Tuesday morning expletive-laden vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial.

According to WTTG-TV, the National Park Service first saw red spray paint on the Lincoln Memorial Tuesday at around 4:30 a.m. The vandalism, painted on one of the monument's columns, read "f*** law."

Lincoln Memorial vandalized today per @NatlParkService pic.twitter.com/ko4U1uLGLA

— Lindsay Watts (@LindsayAWatts) August 15, 2017

The National Park Service also said it found a Smithsonian sign defaced with silver paint along the National Mall in the nation's capital.

By Tuesday afternoon, the red expletive at the Lincoln had been covered up with paper, according to WJLA-TV.

Paper covers the spot where someone sprayed red paint on the Lincoln Memorial. The Park Service if trying to clean it pic.twitter.com/FLhHihOU8k

— Sam Ford (@ABC7Sam) August 15, 2017

Historic preservation crews said they applied to the column a "gel-type architectural paint stripper safe for use on historic stone."

The crews added that "treatments will be applied as necessary until all evidence of the graffiti is gone," WJLA-TV reported.

The acts of vandalism were discovered just days after a white supremacist terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, left one woman dead. Two Virginia State Police officers who were responding to the violence were also killed in a helicopter crash.

The Charlottesville protests were sparked by the city's plan to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Days after Charlottesville, a number of other cities, including Lexington, Kentucky, announced plans to "accelerate" the removal of other Confederate statues.

The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which is the nation's largest Muslim civil rights organization, called on every state and local government in the country to scrub all Confederate references in light of what happened in Charlottesville.

The targeting of the Lincoln Memorial is curious, however, since the nation's 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, is the man who many credit with leading the United States out of the dark era of slavery.

While plenty of famous Americans owned slaves or supported the Confederacy, a point some make when advocating to either remove statues or change the names of highways named for those individuals, it was Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in Southern states as free people, thus sparking the American Civil War.

(H/T: Daily Caller)